Yes, it’s four in the morning. Yes, I stayed up late and it doesn’t look like I fell asleep. No, this is not the first time this has happened to me.
In fact, as I read in bed a while ago, this is not the first time this has happened to me, or to millions of people. According to the American National Health Survey, 17.8% of Americans have sleep problems. And if we listen to Gallup, those numbers rise to 28%. What is happening there?
Lost hours. In Spain, the situation is not much better. According to the Spanish Federation of Sleep Medicine Societies (FEMES), about seven million Spaniards suffer from chronic and long-lasting insomnia, and in fact almost six million take sleeping pills every night. In less than a century, the average Spaniard “stopped sleeping” two hours a day.
And as Carlos Egea, president of FEMES, emphasized in EFE, “sleep is not like fat, the body does not store it, it is day by day”. This means that we expose our bodies to unnecessary “mental and cardiovascular health” risks day after day. In addition, lack of sleep is associated with metabolic diseases, with a greater predisposition to Alzheimer’s disease and all kinds of immune problems.
Four in the morning. Okay, insomnia is a problem, but when we think about it, we tend to think only of sleep insomnia: people who have trouble falling asleep. The thing is, there are many other types of insomnia: one of them is waking up in the middle of the night and spending hours with your eyes wide open.
And it actually makes sense. We already know that biphasic sleep (a sleep pattern in which hours are divided into two blocks separated by a period of wakefulness) has been normal for most of human history. For historical, cultural and technological reasons (the nights were long and we didn’t have efficient lighting systems), but also for biological reasons.
Mainly because sleep cycles (physiologically speaking) do not last eight hours. In fact, each night has four to six sleep cycles (a series of stages that occur and repeat during our daily sleep). We are talking about a sequence of REM stage and three non-REM stages, each deeper than the previous one.
Even if we put six cycles side by side, there is usually a period between cycles when sleep becomes very light. If we wake up there and have trouble sleeping (whether due to circadian rhythms that modulate melatonin or for any other reason)… the result is problematic.
Why do we wake up? That’s the key question, isn’t it? If we can stop waking up, insomnia has much less ability to destroy our lives. Well, according to the Cleveland Clinic, there are four main reasons why people wake up hours earlier: two of them are sleep disorders and underlying emotional disorders (stress, depression, anxiety…). Problems for which it would be advisable to go to a specialist.
The other two reasons are the environment in which we sleep (outdoor noise, light, temperature changes) and visits to the bathroom. That is, things that, although we may not believe it, are “easier to control” than we think.
Can we do something? This means that in at least half of the most common cases, we can limit sleep disturbances with proper sleep hygiene. Things like keeping a regular schedule, eliminating naps, avoiding screens in the last hours of the day, moving physical activity forward and not leaving it until the end of the day, and avoiding alcohol, tobacco, or caffeine before bed.
But above all, we can remember that sleep problems are often an “indicator” of something else. If the problem persists, it is advisable to see a specialist.
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Image | Greta Bartolini